Public Policymaking in India integrates various elements of the policymaking process that have, till date, been dealt with separately. These include interest group politics, the role of the media, judicial policymaking, and policy entrepreneurship by civil society groups. Policymaking is no longer a privileged activity of the government: As the boundary between the government and the "outside" has become more porous, the power of non-state policy actors outside the government has increased enormously. The author points to the ways in which the policymaker can cope with this brave new world of policymaking. He also grounds the theory of policymaking in concrete examples of the Green Revolution, economic reforms, patent law amendments, regulation of private educational institutions, and laying down of standards for cola drinks, thereby facilitating easy comprehension and retention of concepts

This is the first book on public policy and policy analysis in the Third World. It shows the need to develop an interdisciplinary approach to policy-making, one that combines policy and management analysis with political and ethical appraisal. The book examines the 'rational choice' approach to policy analysis, then looks at case studies, and finally reviews the international experience in public policy-making.

This book comprehensively chronicles the history of the education policymaking in India from 1947 to 2016 with a focus on the developments after 1964 when the Kothari Commission was constituted. The book is informed by the rare insights acquired by the author while making policy at the state, national, and international levels of governance. Another distinguishing feature of this book lies in the attention it pays to the process and politics of policymaking and the larger setting—or, to use jargon, the political and policy environment— in which policies were made at different points of time. The author brings out a crucial analysis of the Indian educational system against the backdrop of national and global political, economic, and educational developments. Two other distinguishing features of the book are the systematic treatment of the regulation of education and the role of judiciary in the making and implementation of education policies.

The inexorable advent of globalization has transformed the public policymaking process into a multi-faceted challenge that transcends traditional policymaking boundaries and forces scholars, experts, and practitioners to redefine their field in terms of both theory and practice. While every policy dilemma has a specific location in time and space, most significant policy issues— climate change, food and water, economic development, global pandemics, terrorism and violence, and migration, to name just a few—now require a collective framing of the problem and a collaborative effort to take effective action. The essays in Public Policymaking in a Globalized World offer valuable insights into how policymaking is evolving from a circumscribed field of inquiry into a truly global dialogue that can help stakeholders to focus on key issues that threaten the survival of our planet.

The deficiencies in the capability of the state to design and implement effective policies are arguably the biggest development challenge facing developing countries like India. This book seeks to assess state capability in India, identify weaknesses in policy design and programme implementation, and their causes, and propose some measures to remedy them. Importantly, it does so while recognizing political economy constraints and focusing predominantly on the administrative contributors. To this extent, the book's suggestions are practical enough for adoption by stakeholders at different levels. It describes the institutional design, constitutional provisions, the organizational structure, and the personnel of the Indian state. It covers a wide spectrum of aspects impacting state capability, ranging from ideological narratives and systemic constraints to procedural and personnel management issues to the behaviours and attitudes of individual bureaucrats. It offers a new analytical framework to think about effectiveness of state on the policy-making process. It also offers a nuanced perspective and suggestions on many of the popular themes in public administration - size of the state, generalist and specialist debates, lateral entry, digital monitoring systems in governance, outsourcing and private participation, use of consultants, risk aversion in bureaucracies, performance-based incentives, programme evaluations, and so on. Finally, being participants and observers in the bureaucratic system, the authors describe reality without always seeking to locate it in the framework of existing academic literature, thereby offering fresh insights and enriching the discourse on state capability.

How effective is the Indian polity in making laws and policies to address changing ground realities? How do its gears work? Which stakeholder groups are more successful in bringing about policy change, through what methods, and in what contexts? Seeking to answer these questions, Shaping Policy in India takes a close look at nine landmark Indian laws and legislative attempts to reveal the sociopolitical process of policy formulation in the world’s largest democracy. Offering in-depth accounts of the evolution of these nine major legislations, this book interrogates the suitability of existing political theories to explain the policy development process in an emerging economy like India. It covers recent events in the 1999–2014 period that have underlined the role of non-government players in law-making in India, as well as long-standing movements like right to information, right to education, and food security. Case studies have been used to assess the complexity against the relief of existing political theories, invariably developed in the West and to identify gaps in current political theory in understanding the nature of issue-based political movements, advocacy, and activism. The book then takes a few initial steps towards suggesting a paradigm based on complexity theory that may better serve to illuminate this critical part of the political process.

While a growing private sector and a vibrant civil society can help compensate for the shortcomings of India’s public sector, the state is—and will remain—indispensable in delivering basic governance. In Rethinking Public Institutions in India, distinguished political and economic thinkers critically assess a diverse array of India’s core federal institutions, from the Supreme Court and Parliament to the Election Commission and the civil services. Relying on interdisciplinary approaches and decades of practitioner experience, this volume interrogates the capacity of India’s public sector to navigate the far-reaching transformations the country is experiencing. An insightful introduction to the functioning of Indian democracy, it offers a roadmap for carrying out fundamental reforms that will be necessary for India to build a reinvigorated state for the twenty-first century.

This textbook is a comprehensive, student-friendly guide to public policy in India. It highlights the critical aspects of public policy-making and its implementation by contextualizing it in the Indian historical and modern-day perspective. Public Policy in India: • Provides lucid explanations of theoretical aspects of public policy and its practice in the Indian context; • Captures the complexities in making, implementing and evaluating public policy; • Studies the dialectical interconnection that public policy has with the socio-economic and political environment; • Highlights the influence of culture on public policy; and • Analyses public policy as an outcome of a very complex contextual dialogue involving various kinds of actors. Accessibly written, this book covers a range of university syllabi and will be essential reading for students and researchers of political science and public administration. It will also be indispensable for civil service examinations, including the UPSC.

New Welfare Policy and Democratic Politics in India offers an analysis of India’s welfare policy during the last couple of decades. It looks at how welfare policy making is viewed as a function of party competition and voter mobilization, showing a gradual transformation of political clients into entitled citizens through which democratic politics in India has redefined its contemporary welfare discourse. The book argues that political parties formulate policies in order to respond to the voices of citizens and shows that a new welfare architecture emerged in India, characterized as responsive welfare. India has witnessed a sharp rise in such voices, which have been disadvantaged by a globalizing market. The size and vulnerability of this group has made them politically significant and electorally salient. These welfare aspirants have found a new political space through political parties to negotiate and assert their claims on the state, creating a milestone in India’s democratic politics trajectory, in the form of entitlement-based welfare policy. The book compares and evaluates the implications of these new welfare policies in the contexts of two governments: the Congress-led government during 2009-2014 and the BJP-led government during 20014-2019. The empirical data reveal remarkable similarities in their electoral pledges, policy outputs, policy outcomes and accountability towards citizens. These findings indicate significant convergence in their welfare policies, sans ideology or ethnic support base. It also reveals that the ideological differences among the two major parties do not prevent remarkable continuities in the formulation and implementation of welfare policies during their incumbencies, thus allowing for a bipartisan acceptance of a citizen-centric welfare policy. Offering a new analysis to understand this citizen-party-policy linkage in the formulation of welfare policy in India, the book presents a macro analysis of India’s interface between democratic politics and welfare policy. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of the politics of welfare, democratisation in changing societies, comparative politics and Indian and South Asian Studies and Asian Politics.

The Constitution establishes a collection of fundamental principles and fundamental norms that define and identify the many laws and rules that apply to the general public and that govern various facets of state and national organization. The country's constitution serves a distinct fiction, it's founded on values that motivate the population to stay put. There is a wide variety of cultures and religions represented among the people of India. A constitution lays up a framework of laws and values that all residents must uphold. This is the foundation upon which the government of a nation can rule its people. The Indian constitution upholds all the democratic qualities that a contemporary person may hope for People of all faiths are given the freedom to practice their religions of choice. Since it is a secular state. Indian law does not prohibit its citizens from practising any religion of their choosing. Citizens of India have the right to freedom of expression and all religions are respected. They have no restrictions on their travel and may go wherever in the nation. Since they were elected by and served the people, democratic governments provide them with every resource they could need. This book covers the main topics in the field of the Indian Constitution-People, Politics and Government, including comprehending the Indian government and its political aspects, local government in India, and contemporary India with its economy, society, and politics. The further book discusses the Indian reservation policy and other crucial aspects of public policymaking in India.